I'm one of those really terrible people who actually enjoyed COVID. A fact that I always feel a bit guilty admitting. Obviously, it was horrible and awful and devastating for countless people, families, and communities. But I'm not going to lie and say that I didn't enjoy that whole semester stuck at home. Earlier that year, I transferred schools. Going from a small Catholic school to a backwoods public high school was world-shaking for me. I was completely out of my element. I was so anxious every day that I practically vibrated and shook like a fish. My room had always been a sanctuary for me, but after that year, it became my universe. 

The world shut down during spring semester, and I spent the rest of the year online. I barely left my room during quarantine. I ate a lot of sandwiches, watched a lot of TV, skipped homework, and scrolled on TikTok. I dyed my hair and designed weird buttons. I made iron-on t-shirts of Debby Harry and Lydia Deetz. I drove around and ate lunch in parks. I explored all my childhood neighborhoods. Stalked my old houses. I decorated my little red car with necklaces and key chains. I would put on crazy makeup and drive for hours at night, blasting music. It was heaven for my small, introverted self. But every day, like every day before, I couldn't fight the gripping feeling of exhaustion. The creeping feeling of lacking something. There was something I wasn't doing. Something I couldn't do. But I wasn't sure what, or why. The only thing I knew was that I wanted to run and crash at the same time. An energy pulsing, burning inside with nowhere to go. I had nowhere to go, other than my room. 

Freshman year of high school, it all seemed to start. I would come home and open up my windows, put on my favorite Joni Mitchell record, and then lie on the floor and dream. I had this fantasy about going out to the lake near my house, wading in, and dissolving. Becoming a ripple, a fading wave in the water. I just wanted to disappear. Sometimes I would be gripped and pulled under by these waves. Other times, I would feel like every inch of my body, every cell and molecule was on fire. Electrified. I wanted to run until I burst into flames. There was no escape from this dance that was my life. I lived in my bedroom. A situation that was only exacerbated by quarantine. It was my mini ecosystem. A tiny universe with its own rules, customs, and religion. I was a solitary planet floating within the galaxy of my room. The plastic glow-in-the-dark stars covering the walls and ceiling were the only light to guide me. 

If it's not already obvious, my teen years were not happy ones. Depression was something that I simultaneously faced and yet denied. I couldn't be depressed. Depressed people didn't shower and slept all day. They didn't wash their clothes or their hair. They sliced themselves up and stopped wearing makeup. I wasn't depressed, I was just tired. Lazy. Ate too much sugar. Didn't exercise enough. Spent too much time on my phone. Didn't journal. Didn't pray. I was just restless. I knew I wasn't depressed because I had people in my life who simply told me that I wasn't. So I just felt like I was a waste of energy. I had things I wanted to do, but for some mysterious reason, I couldn't. I couldn't write. I couldn't draw. I couldn't sew. I couldn't do all the things I wanted to do. I couldn't do anything I wanted to do. I was stuck and trapped within the space of my brain. Pulled in and spit out by its mysterious orbits and waves. No energy to try to escape. All I wanted to do day in and day out was lie down and sleep. I was caught within the pendulum swing of my emotions. Crushing, watery exhaustion and the fiery demon in my body, restlessness.

Looking back on that time, it felt like my room was a living being. A breathing forest. A cavernous hole that sucked in all my emotions and my energy. It felt like it was a sponge, like the walls were somehow porous, and it held onto all my teenage angst. But I guess it's not the room's fault. It's usually the inhabitants who have something to do with that.  

I stayed home for a few more blurry years. It wasn’t until I was 20 that I finally moved out of my little blue room. But even after I moved away to the brown and drab dorm rooms of community college, the feelings followed. No matter how much I tried to fight, I was still pulled under. Pulled back into my brain. Into my body. Into my room. 

The spring came, and with it a chance for a new life. I packed up everything I could into two huge suitcases and moved 3,000 miles away from home. For the first time, I felt like I was finally away away. I felt the depression melting off my bones. I felt like I was getting detoxed. Like my moldy insides were being filled with bleach, killing off the bacteria that grew there. That spring, I began an obsession with "healing my inner teen." I declared that I wanted to do everything she couldn't. Wear what she couldn't, say what she couldn't, kiss who she couldn't. But my efforts just left me feeling depleted. It felt like a Sisyphean task. Like, there was always something I couldn't do. Like, there was this insane standard I could never live up to. Because truth be told, I couldn't. She wanted everything, and I only had so much I could give her.

Since then, I've somewhat given up on inner child healing. If that works for some, then more power to them, but for me, it just feels like an added stressor. I can barely take care of my current 22-year-old self; why should I take on a teen and a child? The thing is, I just don't feel like doing it. I don't want to heal my inner teen. I suppose she still exists somewhere like Schrödinger's cat, but I'm not about to go opening the box, looking for her. I just can't live up to her demands. I can't deal with her depression and restlessness. With her anger and anxiety. With her sadness. The only thing I can offer her is the fact that it does get better. That's it. I can give her guidance and solace, but I'm not her anymore. She's not me. Thank maturing, moving away, or Prozac, but I just don't identify with her. I'm scared of her, though. Scared of becoming her again. But that's impossible. A fact that terrifies as well as comforts me.

I've been in the throes of French classes for my degree, and recently I had an epiphany. Learning to speak a language you barely know is an odd feeling. It's like there is a wall between your brain and your mouth. In your head, you know exactly the words in which you would like to say, the idea that you're trying to get across. But words fail. You can't remember the tense, the conjugation, or even the basic vocab. The nuances of your speech are lost due to inexperience. 

I realized that the feeling I get when I can't think of a specific word or when a sentence dies in my mouth reminds me of being 18 and first starting to draw or write. I had an idea in my head, but the connection was lost on the way to execution. As I'm able to form more sentences, as my brain and skills stretch, it makes me consider the past differently. What if all those years of struggling, feeling apathetic, and ineffective were merely because of a lack of skills? Of experience? 

You don't know what you don't know. As a teen, I had yet to take specific classes in writing and art. I had yet to have people teach me specific things. I had yet to meet specific people, friends who inspire me, who open me up to new ways of considering things. I had never drawn a person, I had never written something personal, and I had not yet amassed my (honestly overwhelming) collection of clothes. I didn't know what I didn't know. I couldn't find myself then. I didn't even know what I was looking for. All I knew was that I was missing something important. 

So armed with my clothes, skills, journals, and sketchbooks, I guess I am somehow looking for younger me in a way. I'm not trying to heal her or rewrite the past. I'm not trying to be someone that she looks up to, but I do try to follow her energy. I go back and see the things she loved, the clothes she wanted, the books she read, the music she listened to. I think I'm still trying to find the things that she wanted to do so desperately. The art she wanted to make, the skills she wanted to have, the way she wanted to look and move through the world. Because I find that those are the things that seem to light me up the most. 

I'm back in my room for a bit this summer. It's simultaneously sweet and triggering to be back. The light blue walls I painted, the hardwood floors I exposed after a summer of ripping up carpet. The bare walls are now devoid of posers, art, and album covers. It feels like exposure therapy. 17, 18, 19-year-old me haunts me like a ghost within those walls, behind every book, sketchbook page, and floorboard. But I feel like I've slowly started banishing her. Even writing this is some form of exorcism. That's not my room anymore. The furniture is new, the bedspread is different. I'm a visitor now, from another planet, just passing through. I'm trying to make peace with this former girl. I offer her my skills, clothes, and outlook on life. Anything to distance myself from her but still humanize her at the same time. I just can't spend my time hanging out with ghosts. I have no hate for this past version of me, just a residual fear that I think follows all those with depression. The fear that one day the jig will be up and you'll awake, 18 again. But thankfully, and I guess at the same time tragically, that girl is gone, but her room remains. Her spirit hovers around me. And all that's left is a tube of old black lipstick, a few dusty books, and some words on a page.